Lubavitch World Headquarters, 770 Eastern Parkway, Crown Heights

Strangers Like Everybody Else

Photography by KRISTA HUSA

was intrigued when I heard about going on a
pilgrimage with Detroiters to the Lubavitcher
Rebbe's grave in Queens, a site that attracts
people from all over the world, and to Boro
Park in Brooklyn, the most rlensely populated
neighborhood in the world for Orthodox (not only
Lubavitch) Jews. This would be something so out of
the realm of my daily life. I'm an outsider, not
Jewish, but have been photographing for the Jewish
News for five years.
I was like a foreigner in a strange land who had a
peek inside a very visual world: men in hats, women
in wigs with prayer books or groups of young chil-
dren, the small barbershops, hat and wig stores, sil-
ver and Judaic shops along the streets. Photo oppor-
tunities were everywhere — at a wedding, where the
men danced wildly; on a street corner at night,
where a group of men were praying by moonlight.
The photos are a collection of what I visually
experienced of a different way of life, and where I
found the people to be like everyone else, only they
looked different. ❑

I

— Krista Husa, staff photographer

7/l2

2002

16

The Rebbes gravesite, Queens, New York